- On the eve of the reporting and election water polo conference, for the first time, you had a rather serious alternative candidate for the highest leadership position in the person of Oleg Vladimirov. Did you regard this as some kind of alarming signal for yourself?
- On the contrary.
Oleg Ivanovich and I have known each other for a long time, we met face to face when I learned that he was going to the polls.
And he immediately said that I would be the first to congratulate him if he won.
If it does not happen, I will offer a job on the presidium.
And not at all because I consider Vladimirov to be my friend.
- I got the impression that in the information space they tried to present your confrontation as a scandal ...
- I, on the contrary, was pleased that they started talking about water polo.
Unfortunately, this sport has become of no interest to the media.
- Does that surprise you?
- Well, actually, yes.
Be that as it may, the women's water polo team was the first to qualify for the Olympic Games.
- While the male is in a depressing state. Former water polo players write in social networks that the promised centers have not been created in the regions, the pools have not been built. There are no new teams, no methods, no sponsors. There are no broadcasts due to the conflict with Match TV. I'm not even talking about the results of the men's team ...
- Good questions, albeit tough ones.
The topic with sponsors, I think, is already closed (on December 9, the Water Polo Federation signed sponsorship agreements with the industrial enterprises RATM Holding, the largest pharmaceutical holding Biotech, the energy company Inter RAO and the leading construction and investment company of Russia Ingeocom .
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).
Unfortunately, we have few basic regions.
I am very pleased that the situation in St. Petersburg has moved forward.
There, the leadership of the federation changed, which I myself contributed, new people came.
Now in St. Petersburg "Dynamo" there are already three teams, and the main one even knocked out Kazan "Sintez" from the Cup of Russia.
It's not the first year I've been saying like a parrot on every corner: without a strong domestic championship, there will be no rise in water polo in the country.
What do we have now?
Five clubs compete for the championship: Volgograd, Astrakhan, Kazan, Moscow and St. Petersburg.
And we both remember the times when eight professional teams played in Moscow alone.
- Are you talking about reviving them?
- There is already an agreement with Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin to create a new club.
However, until we came to the final decision: to found a completely new team, calling it, say, "Moscow", or to revive the once famous CSK Navy from scratch.
Another agreement exists between the leadership of the Moscow Water Polo Federation and the Moscow Sports Department for financial assistance in the creation of another club.
If we manage to realize all this, three teams will play in the capital.
This, I think, is a big plus.
- Is the project to create the Continental Water Polo League a link in the same chain?
- This is an additional opportunity to create competition, to attract Kazakhstan, Belarus, where the same problem is observed as ours.
There is no one to play with, no teams.
And in the same Italy there are 300 water polo clubs.
We somehow came to play a friendly match in a town whose name I can't remember now.
Believe it or not, you don't always see this on football: horse militia, crowded stands.
In Hungary, 17 thousand spectators came to the Spain-Russia meeting.
And we have?
In fact, there is not a single stationary sports complex in the country where the world championships could be held.
Even in 2015, in Kazan, water polo players played in a combined pool installed at a football stadium.
- When professionals begin to criticize your activities in the same water polo, does it hurt?
- The federation in this sport is built in such a way that the presidium controls everything.
When at the reporting and election conference Vladimirov warned that he intended to harshly criticize all the previous four-year work, I asked him why he had been silent before when he was sitting on the podium.
Why didn't you say a word in four years?
We all love to criticize.
But, unfortunately, this is where it all ends.
As soon as you need to do something real, no one is around.
- The current pandemic year, which for water sports has passed virtually without competition, can be considered thrown out of life?
- I think this is a very successful year for me personally, despite the fact that I myself have had a rather hard time with coronavirus.
Successful in the sense that in the elections to the European Swimming League (LEN), at first 95 out of 102 people voted for me, and then we managed to get seven more people into various technical committees.
This has never happened.
Then Gennady Alyoshin (former president of the Russian Swimming Federation, honorary member of LEN and the Bureau of the International Swimming Federation (FINA) -
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)
came to me
and said: "I don't understand how you did it."
Many leaders, not only sports ones, called and congratulated.
This is very pleasant, and I am proud that today, when Russians, to put it mildly, do not really want to be seen in international sports organizations, we have managed to achieve such a result.
By the way, taking this opportunity, I would like to express my deep gratitude to the Chairman of the Supreme Supervisory Council of the Russian Swimming Federation Denis Manturov.
He helped us a lot during those elections both with his connections and his own experience.
I can say for sure that without his support it would be very difficult for us to maintain our positions at the level at which they are now.
A person is very busy in his own service, but even now, in the era of a pandemic, it has never happened that he did not find time to discuss some sports problems and take an active part in solving them.
- How difficult was it today to find such powerful sponsors for water polo?
- Surprisingly, there were no difficulties with this.
People came themselves and expressed a desire to help.
Together with Engeokom, we once built the Olympic Stadium in Sochi, where the opening and closing of the Games took place.
The founder of Biotech, Boris Spiegel, asked for one thing: that the logo of this company should hang on the sides of the pool where water polo players play.
The president of the RATM concern Eduard Taran is also my longtime partner, for many years he has been helping diving.
- If so much money is given for water polo, how much should be given for synchronized swimming?
- In synchronized swimming, the budgets are closed.
But there are no problems with sponsors there, some are even refused.
The Board of Trustees is very careful to ensure that the business reputation of those who give money is impeccable.
- You have no shortage of sponsors, but at the same time there are no contracts to show the competition. Why? Because of your conflict with Match TV?
- The conflict no longer exists - it settled down the other day.
- And for what reason, if not a secret?
- In early September, we held a stage of the High Diving World Cup in Yalta.
Competitions last one day and last two hours.
People came, as it turned out later, from some local branch of Match TV, and asked us a lot of money for the broadcast.
I was, to be honest, pissed off.
In the midst of a pandemic in Crimea, we are holding a stage of the World Cup with the participation of all foreign stars of the first magnitude, bringing them to Russia was a colossal problem, and we still have to pay for it?
Against the background of the fact that this year there were no competitions at all, 24 thousand spectators came to our stands.
How can such an event not be shown?
And then what to show at all?
Therefore, we paused all relations with Match TV.
We quietly filmed our competitions on drones, paid 200 thousand rubles for it, and posted the video on all social networks.
The company of Alexander Mamut "Rambler" helped a lot, which posted the video on the Internet for free.
- But will the relationship with Match TV still continue?
- Yes.
We agreed that we will form a calendar.
The company has expressed a desire to cover all the high diving tournaments that will take place in Russia.
For the rest, I immediately warned that you need to be prepared for competition.
For example, Telesport is ready to conclude an agreement with us regarding all significant competitions that take place in water sports.
- High diving seems to be the most attractive 'product' on the list ...
- In this form, we have a lot of different proposals due to the fact that we have made our own tower.
For example, do you know that FINA takes € 900,000 just to bring the diving tower to the competition, assemble and disassemble it?
We made the tower ourselves, assembled it ourselves, held competitions on it in Crimea.
And today five cities are asking us to bring a high diving tournament to them.
These are Yalta, Nizhny Novgorod, Moscow, Kaliningrad, Ufa.
In the capital, the tower will be installed on Vorobyovy Gory.
Can you imagine what kind of view will open from there?
And 50 thousand spectators on the observation deck will definitely accommodate.
- Since we smoothly moved on to diving, explain why the Olympic champion Ilya Zakharov received a one and a half year suspension for missing doping tests, that is, not the most malicious violation, despite the fact that the top management of FINA was entirely on his side?
- I myself, frankly speaking, had no doubt that Zakharov would not be severely punished.
Ilya and I flew to the proceedings in Lausanne together, immediately met with the executive director of FINA, Cornel Marculescu, who agreed that tough sanctions were unlikely to take place.
Zakharov never used doping in his life, missed two tests for his slovenliness, and the third time, as it seemed to me, the flag was generally set in a rather dubious way.
But when in the morning we came to the doping panel together with two top leaders of the international federation, they were immediately cut off, they were not even allowed to enter the trial hall.
Only me and Zakharov were allowed in.
And for three and a half hours, three people - an American, an Englishman and an Arab - interrogated us crossly.
It was a very tough interrogation.
Moreover, it was an absolute revelation for me how well the people were informed and prepared to talk with us.
- At what plan?
“They knew absolutely everything.
They asked Zakharov seemingly strange questions: “On which seat of the car did the phone lie when you were driving there and there?
Why did you go there, although you should have been elsewhere? "
As a result, all our arguments were smashed to smithereens.
Ilya was very professionally and clearly proved that in all three cases he really violated the anti-doping rules.
When I realized that we no longer had any chances to defend our position, I started joking with the Englishman and the American, that is, I turned the conversation into a normal human channel.
And they told us in a completely different tone, they say, they perfectly understand that Zakharov is not a violator, but a normal athlete who has never really been convicted of anything.
But there are rules that everyone has accepted, which means that the person who violated them should be punished.
- In fact, the decision is correct ...
- I still, deep down, consider the verdict to be unfair, but, on the other hand, I understand that the precedent with Ilya disciplined so many athletes.
Today, no one allows themselves to leave somewhere unauthorized, the door for doping officers cannot be opened, and so on.
- You are the head of the FINA technical committee for diving and you are a liaison, that is, the representative of the FINA Bureau in the synchronized swimming technical committee. In which of these sports are you more empowered?
- I would not say that there is a difference.
In the jump technical committee, the position of the liaison is taken by a Chinese woman, but she does not make a single decision without me.
As I am without her.
That is, it is a joint work of people of equal status.
- How do you manage to coexist peacefully, despite the fact that there is a constant clash between the Chinese and the rest of the world in matters of refereeing at the international level?
- The whole world really opposes the Chinese refereeing.
- Nevertheless, it still exists ...
- I have asked these questions to the leaders of the International Federation many times, one on one, and in front of everyone.
The technology is very simple: judges are selected for the Games on a four-year cycle.
In all competitions, the work of the FINA referees is overseen by a representative of the technical committee appointed by the liaison.
As a rule, this is also Chinese.
If a judge gives a poor mark to one of the Celestial athletes, his rating is slowly lowered.
And it turns out that only those specialists who judge Chinese jumpers as well as possible get to the Olympics.
Perhaps next year we will be able to change this practice if at the next elections to be held in Tokyo before the Games, a representative of another country takes the position of a liaison in diving.
- Will the Games themselves take place?
- I have already been sent a ticket to Tokyo, so I have no doubt that the Olympics will be held.
The question is whether the audience will be there.